Misadventures in Peterborough, Pt. 2

I’m in St. Malo, near Winnipeg, Manitoba, Canada. More importantly I am writing this from within the house of Lawrence Jonathan Laxdal.

But I’m getting ahead of myself.

In terms of getting out and seeing things, Warsaw Caves turned out to be the high point of the Peterborough chapter of my vacation. I was hoping we could go to Burleigh Falls, but due to our dependency on finding a driver, as well as the need for spectacular weather in which to go swimming, our plans never panned out. Instead, we consumed more alcohol than I suspect I have ever consumed in my entire life.

Peterborough isn’t actually that small a town; if you count its outlying areas, it apparently has somewhere in the vicinity of 100,000 inhabitants, which is alledgedly the amount of people living in Copenhagen proper. The difference being the greater Copenhagen area has a million people, most of whom work or study in Copenhagen and have most of their social life there. Peterborough definitely feels like a small town, and when you go out, it seems impossible not to run into somebody you know – at least when you’re in the company of an old local party animal.

There’s a certain sort of pre-establishment 20-something social circle that you occasionally encounter in North American fiction, for my part most recently in the (Canadian, as it just so happens) Scott Pilgrim books, which I haven’t had any personal experience with. I’m not sure if this is because circles like that don’t exist in Denmark, or if it’s simply that I fail to get out enough to become part of one. Either way I got a fairly solid idea of what it’s like after meeting what must be every 20-something in Peterborough and even living with a couple of them for a week. It’s fun, and it’s interesting, but it’s also kind of taxing – I’m just not that social; I managed it because I’m on vacation, but I doubt I’d be able to keep it up all the time.

Thursday we went out to a cabin owned by one of Alex’s old friends. It was by the lake and very pleasant all around, and we spent most of the time playing Ping-Pong or Talisman, watching Burn Notice, drinking heavily, and roasting things over a campfire. Sadly there was no swimming, as the water was a little icky and the weather kind of bland a lot of the time. We went home on Saturday in time to help our Peterborough hosts build a trebuchet out of the remains of an old staircase.

Sunday brought about some shopping (I found a very nice second-hand book shop where I traded War of the Flowers in for Red Storm Rising – kind of random, I know), some more work on the siege weapon, and a nice calm barbeque with some more of Alex’s old friends at a really nice apartment with a roof deck overlooking the whole downtown. I went home soon after midnight so I wouldn’t feel too bad when I had to get up to catch the bus back to Toronto the next morning.

The voyage from Peterborough to Winnipeg via Toronto took the whole day and was distributed across bus, taxi, airplane, and car, but I made it without throwing up, so that’s a good trip as far as I’m concerned. At first glance, Winnipeg looks about the size of Peterborough, which came as quite a surprise seeing how it’s the capital of the province, but apparently Manitoba is extremely thinly populated – even by Canadian standards. After dinner and my first ever, somewhat traumatic, visit to Wal-Mart, Lawrence drove us out to his house way out in hillbilly country.

I won’t hesitate to say it was the best drive I’ve ever taken. In fact it was probably the only good car ride I’ve ever taken. It was like the shortest road trip ever, just under an hour along completely straight country roads, through the flattest terrain I’ve ever seen – and I’m Danish, so that’s saying a lot. Honestly, I’d been told that Manitoba was mostly prairie, but I’d kind of written that off. How much prairie should I really expect in this modern age of thorough agricultural exploitation?

Well, I was partially right, every inch of land has been converted to farmland, but the whole countryside still emanates prairie. Especially since I picked a particularly fortuitous time to arrive, just as thunderstorms were rolling around the most dramatic sky I’ve ever seen, a spectacular light show flashing across the clouds throughout the drive. It genuinely felt like how America should feel, and it was very easy to imagine hard men on horseback herding cattle across the fields. With unobstructed views for miles in all directions, the sky has never seemed higher than it is in Manitoba.